TYPO3 Talk With Sybille: Configurability and Expendability Are TYPO3's Asset

I work at a German university in the Northwest of Germany. In the past, I have been known as a Documentation Team member and contributor but currently I am focusing more on my own extensions. I wear many hats and change them frequently (figuratively, not literally).

I applied for a job which required it. I had no prior knowledge of TYPO3, not even PHP programming or web development. I had mostly worked with Java, C++ and C. It made total sense at the time but looking back, I am wondering “What was I thinking?!?”

My company (or rather university) is active in open source development and supports contributions. I contributed to the official documentation, the TYPO3 core and some extensions. Sometimes it was about submitting back a bugfix I found and which was necessary for solving a problem at work.

I always say, I got back more than I contributed, especially at the beginning. It helped me to gain insights and improve myself. But - most of all - it helped to motivate or at least challenge me.

I can’t really say because I don’t have my own business. If I did, I would try to hire (very) good people and keep them happy.

Frankly, I was not always a fan of TYPO3. Over the years, I came to appreciate it more and more. I understood some of the reasons why things were done the way they are. 

What seemed complicated before, I now consider extremely powerful. A huge asset of TYPO3 is its configurability and extendability. That is top notch (though some things could still be streamlined more).

I am not sure about TYPO3’s future vision.

My personal vision would be - “easy to get started” (as developer, editor, admin etc.). In every sense. There are still some things which make it confusing and difficult, IMHO. A part of this is documentation. Another is that there are often many ways to do things, up to date and “authoritative” information is difficult to find. I think you should be able to get started with everyday things, using only the official documentation and not need to go to user groups, read additional blogs etc. (though it is nice to do this too)

There was major refactoring being done and considering that - I think we are doing great. Some new features and ideas for the TYPO3 ecosystem are very promising, so I am rather optimistic.

But, right now, I think it should be all hands on deck for core and documentation.

And come together as a community and work on a common vision.

I am actually not sure. I think in some ways, TYPO3 is superior to the competition.

But it has a bad reputation of being overly complicated and having bad documentation. Both have improved but the reputation takes longer to change.

In order to expand globally, I think we should have more online events and combined in-person / online, so we can come together regardless of location. This is currently necessary because of the Corona pandemic, but I think it would be nice to keep it up in the future. 

Also, there used to be a lot of resources (blogs, videos, tutorials, events) in German only. This has now improved.

I think the solution should not be to force everyone to use English - there are still vibrant local communities in native language everywhere, not just in Germany. But I think the focus should be to try to make more English resources available: events, blogs, videos, tutorials and make it easy to find these. 

For the events, it would help if it was easy to find them and filter them by language and location / online.

Regularly get feedback from the community / contributors.

I looked at it a while ago, but to be honest there are so many extensions and other things, I never get around to really tinkering with it. If the usefulness is not immediately obvious to me, it gets added to my endless todolist.

I think it might have worked with python too. In any case, it is good that a well known and easy to learn programming language was used.

PHP is fairly easy to learn and it is possible to write good quality code, especially using additional tools (like static analysis, rector, codestyle checkers, tests etc.). PHP has a bad reputation which (in my opinion) no longer applies to reality today.

There are many great and underrated TYPO3 features. Some of them are configurability & extensibility, multilingual, multi-site (several sites in one installation), BE group / user management, the TYPO3 community, the TYPO3 events.

Mentors / helpful have been (among others) Benni Mack, Mathias Brodala, Georg Ringer, Markus Klein, Daniel Siepmann, Martin Bless, Simon Gilli, Christian Kuhn, Mathias Schreiber. I also often get helpful insight from Slack channels, twitter and Stack Overflow.

The b13 blog in general is often excellent. I often find T3Planet blog entries when googling and it answers the many questions I often don’t find answered in the documentation. The usetypo3 blog by Daniel Goerz is excellent. Also, I follow several people on Twitter.

The marketing / communication I see is currently often done in the TYPO3 bubble. It would be good to get some people who have a larger audience or can reach more people, e.g. via publications in more general magazines, blogs etc.

Also, it would be helpful to get people who are very active in other CMSs or frameworks and can give some new insights from “the outside”.

It would be good to have some reference / showcases - both for download or which you can visit online and see TYPO3 in all its glory. Typo3.com is a good example for a blog. You can also download the blog extension. It would be great to have more examples like that for other types of sites.

I love humor, the outdoors, nature, reading and many other things.